Berkeley bay area health officers’ statement about coronavirus vaccines

March 15, 2021 BAY AREA HEALTH OFFICERS’ STATEMENT ABOUT COVID-19 VACCINES Berkeley, California (Monday, March 15, 2021) - As local health officers, we fully support all three currently

available vaccines for COVID-19. All three vaccines are safe and have been shown to be highly effective at preventing symptomatic illness and hospitalization. The clinical trials for all

three vaccines demonstrated that they were 100 percent effective in preventing deaths from COVID-19. There is also growing evidence that all three vaccines help prevent asymptomatic illness,

too. This means that people who have been vaccinated are not likely to spread of COVID-19 to others who are not vaccinated. There has been much debate about the advantages of one brand of

vaccine over the other, but it's difficult to compare their efficacy. The different brands of COVID-19 vaccines have not been studied in head-to-head comparisons. The vaccines have each

been studied in slightly different groups of people and tested at different phases of the pandemic. The rates of community transmission and presence or absence of COVID-19 variants differed

across studies. What we can say with certainty is that all three vaccines provide levels of protection that are comparable to some of the best vaccines we have for other serious infectious

diseases for which we routinely vaccinate people. With COVID-19 continuing to circulate as we work toward community immunity, our collective medical advice is this: the best vaccine is the

one you can get the soonest. The different vaccines have different storage requirements and with supplies of vaccine currently limited, the same brand may not be available at each vaccine

site consistently. ------------------------- _This press release was produced by the City of Berkeley. The views expressed here are the author’s own._